Companies are often
starting multiple projects, going through some design and
evaluation phase, and then picking directions between
competing projects (concepts) -- and killing the other
one. But politics and other things going on, and some
individuals (groups) will keep projects and ideas going
(and they may come back), and some good projects die due
to critical people leaving, politics, or how much it
would take to bring to market, and so on. So there is
some bizarre evolution and rebirth and mutation of
projects.

Pre-PowerPC RISC
Projects

Tesseract -
PowerPC based RISC tied in with Pink OS. Totally new
hardware and OS (very aggressive). When Pink (Taligent)
broke off this died (and more moderate PDM survived).

Cognac (Named
after John Hennessy, a pioneer in RISC technology),Piltdown Man or
PDM - the "missing
link" between 68000 Macs and Tesseract's high-end PowerPC
Mac. This is the project that survived -- Apple's
68k-compatible RISC project.

I've also heard of
Roman and
Zorro for RISC
machines, but don't know what they were tied to.

G1 - PowerPC Processors

Remember, G1 and G2 wasn't
used as a name per say, until the G3 (3rd Generation)
came about. They were the First and Second Generation
Chips, and everyone knew that -- they just didn't call
them G1 or G2.

PowerPC 601

IBM ??: 601 (50-66 MHz)

Motorola ??: 601+ (80 - 110 MHz -
.6µm, 4LM process)

G2 - PowerPC Processors

PowerPC 602 -
Galahad - Actually
made after 603 - a stripped and tweaked 603 used for a
set top game box ($600) (not pippin)

G4 (Multicore)
-Desktop99(Apple) - Usually a 4 core G4
(I think it should be called 4x4), but different numbers of
cores get talked about (2 or 3). There are some other
variations in targets as well -- like multiple AltiVec Units
or a shared units and so on.

This stuff can't be written without the help and corrections
of quite a few anonymous sources. Thanks to them for their
help in documenting a little trivia and history. Any help /
feedback is appreciated.